Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,031 posts.

Software Engineering
2015
285

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…

289

Advancing the realtime web

Over the past few months the team at RethinkDB has been working on a project to make building modern, realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming features are the start of an exciting new database access model – instead of polling the database for changes, the developer can tell RethinkDB to continuously push…

293

The God Login

I graduated with a Computer Science minor from the University of Virginia in 1992. The reason it’s a minor and not a major is because to major in CS at UVa you had to go through the Engineering School, and I was absolutely not cut out for that kind